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| Ethnic Chins flee Myanmar crackdown |
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
AIZAWLP: After Myanmar’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in September, ethnic Chins escaping to India say they are being targeted to join pro-junta rallies or pay hefty fines — or worse.
There are approximately two million Chins in Myanmar and Chin organisations say they face persistent persecution for being Christians and non-ethnic Burmese.
At least 13 people were killed and 3,000 detained when Myanmar’s junta suppressed peaceful protests that broke out after a fuel price hike and drew around 100,000 people, led by Buddhist monks, onto the streets.
And in the weeks after the crackdown, Chins, who have a long history of migration to India to escape poverty and forced labour, say the military and its supporters are forcing them to march in support of the junta.
“The army leaders in our village gave a public notice to all the people to attend a rally on Oct 8,” said a Chin woman recently arrived in India who asked not to be identified.
“Anyone not attending would be fined 10,000 kyats or imprisoned. I was ordered to pay this huge amount, which there is no way for me to pay, so I fled rather than face life in an army prison camp.”
Last week, the woman reached Aizwal — the capital of India’s north-eastern Mizoram state which shares a 400-kilometre border with Myanmar, which was previously known as Burma.
Aizwal is around 70 kilometres from the Indo-Myanmar border.
Rights workers say hired gangs allied with the military are using physical force on people to get them to join the rallies.
“They have an organisation called the Chiang Khai Phyu i (Youth Organisation in Support of the Burmese Government), which works with the army,” said Zo Sang Pui, head of the All-Burma Democratic Lushai Women’s Organisation, a Chin group working in Mizoram.
“They are used to beating and physically intimidating the public. This ‘unofficial army’ is more dangerous than the army in uniform as they are nothing but a bunch of untraceable thugs hired by the junta to do all their dirty work,” she said.
In Hakha, the main town in Myanmar’s north-western Chin state and with a population of about half a million, a pro-military rally took place earlier this month, but rights workers said support was forced.
With many of the young having fled to India to earn a living — there are an estimated 100,000 Chin refugees in India, 70,000 of them in Mizoram — it is mostly the elderly who are left behind and they offer little resistance.
“Most are too tired to resist as only old people are left in most villages,” said Salom, coordinator of the Women’s League of Chinland, an umbrella grouping of Chin women’s organisations. “Each house is expected to send one person to attend such rallies or pay a heavy fine. In such circumstances, where people are already weighed down by poverty, the old people simply go and attend,” she said, not wishing to give her last name.
“People come out of fear. The army makes people shout slogans in support of the junta which are filmed and then released through the state TV channels as well as supplied to international news agencies,” said Salom.
“People must understand that these are just false pictures. As a student in 1998, I was also forced to go to one such rally in Hakha.”
A Chin rebel group launched an armed struggle for a separate homeland two decades ago, but later splintered into separate organisations. Mizoram is one of the states in India’s insurgency-wracked northeast to share a border with Myanmar. New Delhi relies on the military regime for help in flushing out militants fighting Indian rule.
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